Are giraffes insincere?
Fact-checking the animal statements from Simon and Garfunkel’s “At the zoo”
In Simon and Garfunkel’s 1968 song “At the zoo”, they describe how some of the animals behave. “The monkeys stand for honesty”, they sing. And “giraffes are insincere”. But how true to the animals’ real behaviour are these descriptions?
Just for fun – and as a special issue for paying Mixture subscribers – I fact-checked all the animal descriptions in “At the zoo” (and the one about the zookeeper).
The lyrics
The relevant part of the lyrics* is as follows:
The monkeys stand for honesty
Giraffes are insincere
And the elephants are kindly but they're dumb
Orangutans are skeptical
Of changes in their cages
And the zookeeper is very fond of rum
Zebras are reactionaries
Antelopes are missionaries
Pigeons plot in secrecy
And hamsters turn on frequently
(*Lyrics © Capitol CMG Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music, Inc)
The fact check
Let’s just go through them one by one.
The monkeys stand for honesty
Are monkeys honest? To find out, we need to see if any researchers have studied honesty in monkeys. Any kind of monkeys will do, but we’re ignoring apes such as gorillas and chimpanzees.
Luckily, people love to study monkey behaviour and there are several studies that look at honesty. Because monkeys don’t talk, the measure for honesty is often something like “sharing food fairly”. Primates definitely know how to share, so if they deliberately choose not too, that could be considered dishonest.
In a study published in 2009, researchers compared three different species of monkeys – capuchin, macaque and spider monkeys. They found that all three of them were capable of hiding food from others and not sharing where it was. That’s not very honest!
Verdict: False. Monkeys do not stand for honesty, at least not always.
Giraffes are insincere
Sincerity is not a trait usually studied in animals, especially not in non-primates like giraffes. If it was monkeys again, we could probably find something (or even use the previous study to argue that hiding food is a form of insincerity).
I started by looking for a possible review (an overview of other studies) on giraffe behaviour. Luckily, in 2021 biologists in Bristol went through more than 400 articles on giraffe behaviour and summarised it all. They give a broad overview of what researchers have gathered about giraffe behaviour so far, and it’s shockingly little. Apparently, giraffe behaviour research only really started in the last decade or so.
Even though there is some information about how giraffes form groups and how they look after their young, no studies seem to have explored giraffes’ sincerity.
Verdict: Unknown. We don’t know enough about giraffes yet.
The elephants are kindly but they're dumb
These are two separate statements about elephants, so I’ve treated them separately.
First, are elephants kindly? By all means, yes they are. Elephants comfort their friends, mourn their dead and cooperate with each other (unless they run out of food). They’re kind.
But is the second part of the statement also true? Are elephants dumb?